Can't focus on print during a pandemic? Audiobooks to the rescue!

In other circumstances, staying home to read as much as I like would be a dream come true. Also, it's pretty much my everyday life. But things are different during the covid-19 period of self-isolation. During the first month, I found myself too anxious to focus on print reading, barely managing 10 pages a day.

Fortunately, my audiobook listening has continued unabated. What I'm looking for in books of all formats is to expand my world by living other lives vicariously. The pleasure I experience from print reading also has to do with intellectual stimulation and love of language. What I get from audiobooks is slightly different and more comforting. The added aural aspect feels like storytelling is surrounding my brain in a cozy toque.

I'm grateful that digital audiobooks (and other materials) continue to be accessible through Edmonton Public Library's databases while the library buildings are closed. Here are some that I've enjoyed that you might also like:

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara
Audiobook read by Indira Varma, Himesh Patel and Antonio Aakeel (available through Overdrive)

Up to 180 children go missing every day in India, which inspired this immersive novel told from the viewpoint of kids. They are full of life, jokes, hopes and worries. The story starts with one child missing, getting darker as more disappear amid sectarian violence, dire poverty and police unwillingness. What really resonated is the way these people live with uncertainty. Another thing that resonated is that the stories we craft to make sense of our lives can comfort us, but they can also fail us.

"Papa's words scatter on the ground for hens to peck and goats to chew, because K-'s ears are shut and they can't get in."

The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care by Anne Boyer
Audiobook read by Amy Finegan (available through RBdigital)

This is a powerful, poetic revolt against misogyny, pink ribbon commerce and the injustices of the health care system in the USA, where a woman dies of breast cancer every 13 minutes. Diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer, Boyer experienced “the curative forces of medical decimation.” She writes: “I survived, yet the ideological regime of cancer means that to call myself a survivor still feels like a betrayal of the dead.”

In these covid-19 days, it's so obvious that everything I read is understood through the filter of what's going on in my life at the moment. For example: "The only time I leave my apartment is to take walks alone. On one of these walks, I forgot myself, petted a large black poodle, then remained in fear of my own hands for a mile." 

Boyer describes this experience: "Every movie I watch now is a movie about an entire cast of people who seem not to have cancer, or, at least, this seems to me to be the plot. Any crowd not in the clinic is a crowd that feels curated by alienation, all the people everywhere looking robust and eyelashed and as if they have appetites for dinner and solid plans for retirement. I am marked by cancer, and I can't quite remember what the markers are that mark us as who we are when we are not being marked by something else."

“It's like the condition of lostness is, when it comes to being a person, what finally makes us real.”

"The great orbs of the unsaid still float through the air."

An American Sunrise: Poems by Joy Harjo
Audiobook read by the author (available through Overdrive)

An absolute gem: I listened to it five times. (It‘s only about 2 hours long.) The collection of poems and other literary forms is about historical and contemporary ramifications of the Trail of Tears. Joy Harjo, a member of Mvskoke Nation, is currently Poet Laureate of the USA.

"I lied frequently. No, I was not okay, and neither was James Baldwin, though his essays were perfect spinning platters of comprehension of the fight to assert humanness in a black and white world. That‘s how the blues emerged, by the way. Our spirits needed a way to dance through the heavy mess, the music a sack that carried the heavy bones of those left alongside the Trail of Tears when we were forced to leave everything we knew by the way."

"We knew our plants like relatives. Their stories were our stories. There were songs for everything then."

"We‘re not losing the birch trees. 
The birch trees are losing us."

The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells
1. All Systems Red 2. Artificial Condition 3. Rogue Protocol 4. Exit Strategy
Audiobooks read by Kevin R Free (available through RBdigital)

I have loved these science fiction novellas more and more as the series goes on, perhaps because they form a larger narrative arc. Murderbot is such a great character: a genderless AI security unit gone rogue, who prefers to be left alone to watch tv dramas, but can‘t help being drawn into situations where humans require help. The stories are told in Murderbot's endearing, funny, and addictive voice.

"Possibly I was overthinking this. I do that; it's the anxiety that comes with being a part-organic murderbot. The upside was paranoid attention to detail. The downside was also paranoid attention to detail."

"I was having an emotion, and I hate that."

The Murderbot Diaries has garnered all kinds of recognition, including Hugo, Nebula, Alex and Locus awards. The fifth in the series, Network Effect, is a full-length stand-alone novel due out next month, May 2020.

Milkman by Anna Burns
Audiobook read by Brid Brennan (available through Overdrive)

Audio is definitely the way to go with the idiosyncratic phrasing and sentence structure of this spellbinding novel. The singular, mischievous voice is perfectly captured in the narration by Brid Brennan. With a jaunty wit that counterbalances the sinister atmosphere, a young woman recounts, in a meandering fashion, being stalked by a creepy politically powerful man. The author's insights into the psychological effects of life under totalitarian control in 1970s Northern Ireland left a deep impression. 

"I didn't know whose milkman he was. He wasn't our milkman. I don't think he was anybody's. He didn't take milk orders. There was no milk about him. He didn't ever deliver milk. Also, he didn't drive a milk lorry. Instead, he drove cars, different cars, often flash cars, though he himself was not flashy."

"So shiny was bad and 'too sad' was bad, and 'too joyous' was bad, which meant you had to go around not being anything; also not thinking, least not at the top level, which was why everybody kept their private thoughts safe and sound in those recesses underneath."

A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride
Audiobook read by the author (available through Overdrive)

Absolutely brilliant and utterly tragic. I tried reading this in print format when it first came out, but I wasn‘t in the right head space at the time. Similar to my current head space, I guess. Audio was definitely the right choice for me, with the Irish author performing her own stream-of-consciousness narrative. No names. No holds barred. Poetic. Gritty. Transcendent.

"And I will not think of your feelings anymore. For it's a bit too much to know."

"But suddenly it's clawing all over me. Like flesh. Terror. Vast and alive. I think I know it. Something terrible is. The world's about to. The world's about to. Tip. No it isn't. Ha. Don't be silly. Stupid. Fine. Fine. Everything will be. Fine. Chew it lurks me. See and smell. In the corner of my eye. What? Something not so good."

To Night Owl from Dogfish by Holly Goldberg Sloan and Meg Wolitzer
Audiobook read by Imani Parks and Cassandra Morris, for the two main characters, plus a full cast for various other missives (available through Overdrive)


"Subject: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re:..." This was so much fun! Emailed epistolary exchanges between two 12-year-old girls on opposite sides of the USA, getting to know each other because their gay fathers have fallen in love. Summer camp mayhem. Tweens meddling in adult affairs. Human fears and foibles. Middle school fiction that's perfect for family listening. It also shows that it's possible to develop friendships while remaining physically distant.

"I tried to press a waterlily—bad idea. Do not attempt. I stuck it in a book. Good thing I‘d already read it and wasn‘t a big fan: dystopian and really depressing. Who needs it?"

The Poison Squad: One Chemist's Single-minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Deborah Blum
Audiobook read by Kirsten Potter (available through Overdrive)

A riveting account of the fight for food safety and labelling requirements in America. Consumers were at one time unaware that the food they were buying contained such things as borax, copper sulphate, lead, burnt rope, coal tar dyes and floor sweepings. (We probably still don't know much about additives, but that's another story.)

You need a strong stomach to read about all the food additives and fakery described in this book. 19th-century dairy producers diluted skimmed milk with water, then added chalk, plaster, dyes and /or calf brains to give it a better colour. “People could not be induced to eat brain sandwiches in a sufficient amount to use all the brains, and so a new market was devised.” Formaldehyde was widely used to hide or prevent spoilage.

John Newell Hurty, Indiana's chief public health officer was asked if he thought it was unhealthy to put formaldehyde in milk. He said: "Well, it's embalming fluid that you are adding to milk. I guess it's alright if you want to embalm the baby."

"In 1847 three English children fell seriously ill after eating birthday cake decorated with arsenic-tinted green leaves."

Harvey Wiley, chief chemist at the US Dept of Agriculture, is the larger-than-life central figure but other heroes include Upton Sinclair, Fannie Farmer and Heinz ketchup. 

I'd also like to give a shout-out to Gastropod, a podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history, which is the reason I picked up this book in the first place.

Falcon by Helen Macdonald
Audiobook read by the author (available through RBdigital)

And, finally, if nature writing is what you need right now, here's something that's loaded with fascinating stuff about falcons: natural history, mythology, species conservation in the era following Silent Spring, hawking as a sport, and other human-raptor interactions around the world. The author also wrote the brilliant H Is for Hawk; she knows her stuff and her passion shines. Macdonald narrates her own work and her voice is lovely. 

"Falcons can excrete uric acid 3,000 times more concentrated than their blood levels. That‘s acidic enough to etch steel."

"When fixing their eyes on an object, falcons characteristically bob their heads up and down several times. In so doing, they are triangulating the object, using motion parallax to ascertain distance. Their visual acuity is astonishing. A kestrel can resolve a 2 mm insect at 18 m away."

"All encounters with falcons are in a strong sense encounters with ourselves--whether the falcons are real or imaginary, whether seen through binoculars, framed on gallery walls, versified by poets, flown as hunting birds, spotted through Manhattan windows, sewn on flags, stamped on badges, or seen winnowing through the clouds over abandoned arctic radar stations."

"Falconry has a vibrant present. In some countries, it‘s part of everyday life. Falcons are carried in local marketplaces and malls to tame them in the United Arab Emirates."